What’s Happening Now?

BLACK FRIDAY | HTTPS | ADWORDS CHANGES

Save the Date – 24 November

Last year many of our clients had their best sales days of the year! Make sure you are ready…

If you want to promote an offer for Black Friday & Cyber Monday then you’ll need to get it to us in plenty of time. We recommend that the offer has a good shelf life as many retailers start their promotions in the week leading up to Black Friday to make sure they max their sales. It applies to pretty much all industries and is a great way to push seasonal sales messages when everyone is in the mood to purchase.

Our favourite client adoption of this American invention was by The Nodus Collection, who used a charitable angle where the client could choose to give their discount to Shelter Box or take it off their purchase. This worked to appease those consumers who find the commercial nature of this promotion unappealing.

We’ll leave you to decide whether you chose to approach it with targets or altruism in mind but whatever you do be prepared as online traffic will be at its highest for retailers and you don’t want to miss out on the action!

A reminder – the Argos website crashed in 2015 and lost the retailer precious sales. Make sure your website is ready for the increase in traffic!

WARNING Do not jump in with both feet, plan a migration to HTTPS carefully with our advice. All ads and links to your website will need to be updated along with other settings like Analytics and urls in AdWords.

Google AdWords Updates

Daily Budget Changes

Google have made a big change in AdWords to enable them to spend up to twice your daily budget on any given day, with the idea that over the month it will even out to your total monthly budget. This isn’t completely new, Google always had the right to spend up to 20% more than your daily budget as long as it evened out over a 7 day period, which was positive if you were missing out on traffic on a popular day for search such as a Sunday.

We don’t know the impact for our smaller advertisers with tight budgets so we are in touch with our team at Google HQ in Dublin. The change is designed to help advertisers who miss out on days with traffic spikes but there will inevitably be budget shifts which could cause some advertisers a problem.

Google Terms and Conditions

Google have updated their terms and conditions and if you want to continue advertising then we will need to accept them. Please advise us if you do not want to accept them as we are going through and agreeing to them on behalf of our clients.

Google Shopping Changes

Back in June, the European Commission ruled “the company had abused its power by promoting its own shopping comparison service at the top of search results.” Read more here >

What does it mean for our clients who advertise on Google Shopplng? CPC’s to go up? ROI to go down? It is impossible to know right now but here is what The Drum have to say about it > read here.

Google Tracking Changes

Our team are going through all our accounts to update the Google Tag Manager / Google Analytics code in line with new guidelines from Google.

This is a busy Autumn of changes to Google AdWords & Analytics which we need to roll out to all our clients.

Promotion Extensions

We love the new promotion extensions that Google have brought out in search campaigns. We hope to take advantage of these for Black Friday promotions. Our only reservation is that they aren’t showing frequently at the moment so we are monitoring how much visibility they have.

Mobile First

Yes we are still going on about this – fast loading website = more conversions as people have the attention span of a gnat! This is especially important on mobile which is probably now your number 1 source of traffic. Take the Page Speed Check

Mobile First is the term given to an approach where a website is designed for a mobile ahead of a desktop and given the data, this is the approach that should be adopted by most B2C companies. Take the mobile test here >